Keen On

Next Monday is Columbus Day. Or should it be Indigenous People’s Day? According to the historian Matthew Restall we should be celebrating both Columbus and Indigenous People on Monday. The author of the timely The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, Restall places Genoa’s most famous sailor as a prisoner of history - endlessly protean to reflect each era’s changing values. The many lives of Columbus, then, is a mirror of how we have thought differently about him over the last 500 years. As history’s greatest saint and sinner, Christopher Columbus might be the ultimate Rorschach test. Tell me what you’ll be celebrating next Monday and I’ll tell you who you are. Happy hols!1. Columbus Was a “Manic Narcissist” Who Believed He Was God’s Agent Restall discovered Columbus wasn’t likable—he descended into believing he was divinely chosen and could even be found in the Old Testament. This grandiosity was partly his undoing as a colonial administrator.2. Columbus Failed as a Colonizer and Administrator Unlike the conq